Wild stat from a recent Marketing Science study: 96% of sponsored tweets carried no disclosure. Other studies found similar rates on YouTube and Pinterest.
To this day, the FTC has never obtained a monetary penalty from an individual influencer for a disclosure violation. The agency mostly targets brands, because policing millions of individual posts is genuinely hard.
And as you’d expect, Generative AI makes this bad situation even worse, with campaign costs approaching zero and fake influencer avatars promoting real products.